Oops! Flickr Bug Made Private Photos Public

The site says only a small number of users were affected

An issue with how popular photo-sharing site Flickr handles photos has led to some embarrassment.

The Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) site shared as public photos that had been marked “private” for as long as three weeks, NBC News reports. While a Flickr spokesman told NBC News that the bug affected only a small group of users, no definitive numbers were available. The site has 51 million registered users.

Flickr announced the problem in an email to users. Vice President Brett Wayn said, “while performing routine site maintenance, we identified a software bug that may have changed the view setting on some of your photos from non-public (i.e., private or viewable only by family and friends) to public. Affected photos were visible on Flickr between January 18th and February 7th, 2013.”

Flickr users who didn’t get the email didn’t have their photo settings changed.